Team 1: RC Car with live video and phone control

One of our colleagues constructed a remote control car using a micro controller. There is a video cam on the car, and 3 fellows wrote an app to connect the mobile phone to control the car, and also sees the video on the screen.

Team 2: 緩跑徑開放時間 Telegram Bot for Running Courses

Since several Ourskyers are long-distance runners and have trained and travelled together for marathons, we wanted to quickly built a bot that could quickly help us find a suitable running courses in Hong Kong’s neighbourhoods to train in. Some Ourskyers are also open data activists, and this small project fitted a lot of people’s interests.

We used Telegram because it’s our company’s choice IM service and it is created open-sourced. One of the problems we encountered was that the data was in PDF format and had different tables and colours, but we finished it! We used PDFMiner (Python), Tabular, and PDFBox (Java/Kotlin) and an output into the Telegram Bot. The HackMD file is available.

Team 3: Opensky with face recognition

Oursky already uses our over-engineered IoT doorlock (Chima Opendoor) that we wanted to automate with face recognition with the launch of the iPhone X. Two colleagues worked on it and the result was interesting. We found that the generated neural network is too big for Raspberry Pi, so we would need to do more work to put it in our door’s production (it’s set up on our Raspberry Pi, but not integrated into the doorlock system).

Team 4: Sublime text + Purescript IDE Bug fix

One of our colleagues has gone all over the world to work with different developers. He wanted to spend the holidays contributing to the open-source community and finished 2 issues a for Purescript IDE integration for Sublime Text 3.

Team 5: 電子支票存款服務 Bot

Another colleague wanted to use an automated bot to deposit e-chques into different bank accounts (such as for the monthly salaries for our 40 colleagues). Currently, cheques need to deposit their cheques manually because not everyone uses the same bank account. Our colleague decided to use RUST to learn a new language. The project is incomplete, but he had a good time!

Team 6: Nanoleaf door sign

Since we already over-engineered our doorlock, a few of us decided to over-engineer our door status notification as well (because people didn’t listen to the door unlocking and couldn’t tell if our doorlock app had worked). The doorlock was previously written in Clojurescript by a former colleague, and the two Ourskyers working on it added a few lines. It was a simple and fun hack.

Team 7: 車 Cam Merger and uploader (Dashup)

An Ourskyer in Taiwan likes to road trips. But when recording videos he has the problem of recording massive video files or many small files that take too long to stitch back together. He teamed up with another colleague to create a cross-platform Electron desktop app that helps users merge mini car-cam videos to upload to Youtube with a simple drag and drop.

It’s finished! Check out the app Dash Up and join #dashup on Slack. The command line for merging videos is here.

Team 8: Skygear Zeromq Improvement

We have a team working on Skygear, our open-source backend-as-a-service, and one of the former team members had always wanted to clean up dependencies on CZMQ (deprecated) to speed up the Docker image building time. After removing the dependency (pull request here) and reducing the shared state, building a docker image went from 50 seconds to 10 seconds!! Thank you!!